I had my issues with the previous film, and while its execution was problematic in many ways, I still think up until that point it was salvageable; even enjoyable to watch for a good chunk of it. But after seeing this, I don't think I've ever walked out of the cinema so frustrated and angry at a singular movie in my entire life. Star Wars is a franchise I grew up with and has been hugely influential to me throughout my life. To see it reduced to something so insulting and fundamentally broken that it makes any further sequels difficult to even take seriously, it just enrages me to my core.
I find myself relating to the rest of the Star Wars fanbase now, yet simultaneously alienated from it, as on the one hand I now feel the rage that they felt toward Episode VIII, but at the same time, there is apparently a sizeable portion of audiences that actually see this film as "fixing" the problems of The Last Jedi, which is a position I simply cannot comprehend. This is a film that fails on almost every level; attempting to fix a bunch of non-problems of The Last Jedi while creating dozens of new problems of its own.
It's hard to even know where to start because there were so many things crammed into this film and so much of it didn't work; there's no clear entry point to begin. So instead, let's skip talking specifics first and just talk about Rise of Skywalker's broader structural issue.
One reason The Martian was one of the greatest sci-fi films of the last decade was because of the sense of tension it created with its main character, Mark Watney. You find yourself wondering how the hell Mark's going to get off Mars and return home given his precarious situation, as his team unknowingly left him behind on the red planet, he doesn't have nearly enough supplies to survive for long, and help won't be on the way for years to come. That's assuming he can even make contact to let anyone know that he's still alive and stranded there in the first place. As far as his crew knows, he's already dead. There are layers on top of layers in obstacles Mark has to contend with, but the reason all of these narrative elements come together to create such an effective sense of tension is because the story strictly adheres to a set of rules; those rules in this case being the laws of physics.
The Martian is a meticulously realistic and grounded film, but it's not even the realism that makes it good. More important than that is that it sticks to its own established rules from beginning to end so that the suspension of disbelief is never broken. Mark never just acquires super powers from radioactive exposure and flies back to earth unharmed; he doesn't suddenly receive a fully-fueled and operational rocket without explanation despite that it was never previously established that such equipment was just lying around. The fact that the film so relentlessly adheres to its own established rules is what allows for Mark's situation to naturally build a sense of tension and to feel the consequences of any misstep, because you know Mark is not going to get an easy out when things go wrong.
Now Star Wars may not be as strictly concerned about scientific accuracy as The Martian is, but it still has its own code that it abides by. Much of the excitement of Return of the Jedi's iconic throne room scene comes from knowing that Luke Skywalker may be a Jedi Master now, but even he doesn't have the strength to defeat the emperor and Darth Vader on his own. Whatever happens during this fight, there's no extra life or sudden power-up that's going to bail him out. There are of course other dynamics going on in this scene that lend to its suspense, like the inner struggle of Darth Vader and whether he has truly given up on the light side--and by extension his own son--but at the core holding it all together, there are grounded stakes set by the rules of the Star Wars universe, which naturally lead into an interesting situation here. Luke can't fight this battle alone, so the only real chance he has to survive in this scene is to convince his father to side with him because he can't just win with crazy cool force powers.
You can feel the desperation and anger in Luke when he lashes out at Vader after being threatened to have his sister turned to the dark side. You see him flung to the floor defenseless and in pain when the emperor electrocutes him. He has real weakness and vulnerability, and by showing it on full display during this scene, it effectively establishes the stakes. The power imbalance between Luke and the emperor is clearly defined and consistent. Luke is powerful but nonetheless still very limited in his capability, and it is through this struggle against uneven odds that we are able to get invested in the story.
Contrast this with The Rise of Skywalker, which seemingly decides to ignore its own rules at every turn. The emperor died in Return of the Jedi? Nah, he's back. Don't ask us how he's back. He just is. Chewbacca dies? Nah, just kidding. C3PO's memory is wiped? Nah, just kidding. Force ghosts can wield lightsabers now? Why doesn't Luke just appear in front of Palpatine and stab him with a lightsaber then? What's he gonna do? Kill Luke's ghost? Is that even possible? Where did the manpower and resources come from to build such a massive fleet of star destroyers? Attack of the Clones spent the entire film building up the mystery behind the clone army and where it came from; fully explaining how it ends up in the Republic's hands. In Episode IX though, there's just a huge fleet. It's just there. But where the hell did it come from?! You can't have that big of a game-changer just show up in the final film and expect the audience to accept it without any explanation. If light speed skipping is so dangerous and skillful to pull off, then why is an entire squad of TIE fighters able to follow Poe's jumps right along with him? Why does the emperor ask Kylo to kill Rey if he actually wants her brought back to him alive?
WHY DID THEY--*Ahem*
The film opens with Kylo Ren on the hunt for Palpatine after it is revealed right in the opening title crawl that the emperor is still alive. I suppose given that all the promotional material for Episode IX pretty much spoiled this plot point already, it's not the worst offense, but it still makes for an incredibly anti-climactic reveal considering how significant this character is to Star Wars lore. Nonetheless, there remains a mystery to solve surrounding the emperor's return, so surely they were saving that in the cards for a big reveal to build up to, right? Nope. In the ultimate cop out, Disney just regurgitates a vague line from the prequel trilogy about how the dark side of the force is a pathway to many abilities some would consider to be unnatural, and that is quite literally the full extent of their explanation for the emperor's return.
How do you have such an integral character with decades of influence in pop culture just nonchalantly show up again with such a casual dismissal of well-established lore? He was clearly seen tossed down a long pit followed by an explosion, and then shortly afterward the entire death star itself was destroyed; presumably with the emperor's mangled corpse still on it. And given that it's been nearly half a century without anything in Star Wars canon implying that the emperor survived after this moment, surely it would warrant at least some buildup or big revelation to properly justify his disappearance for so long. But apparently not. There was more justification and effort put into Luke's jaded characterization in The Last Jedi than there was for Palpatine's return in this film.
Mind you, this revelation is also quickly info-dumped alongside other revelations that should be considered shocking but aren't, like the fact that Snoke was just some kind of mass-produced creation from Palpatine, and that it was really his voice inside Ben's head all along, but all of this is so quickly dispensed with in throwaway dialogue with no buildup that it lands completely flat. With so little attention given to it, it's practically pointless now to even bother with Snoke. Who cares where he comes from now?
These lines felt like rushed attempts to give Palpatine greater agency and significance in the new trilogy's overall plot. It's obvious that none of this was actually planned all that well and they just shoehorned him in at the last minute because they no longer had Snoke to fill his role. Considering how botched Palpatine's introduction is, this results in not only damaging the new trilogy's narrative, but even the original trilogy to a certain extent, as it devalues the struggle and sacrifices made by Luke and Anakin in the final battle of Endor. They never truly defeated the empire or Palpatine; only caused him to go into hiding for a while.
Things get really messy when we start examining the MacGuffin plot too. A huge chunk of this movie centers around the characters chasing not one, not two, but three MacGuffins. Now generally when it comes to writing, MacGuffins aren't necessarily a bad thing. They can be a useful tool to get your characters to go on an adventure when they otherwise don't have a good reason to. But a MacGuffin by itself is usually arbitrary, and the real purpose of employing one is to get your characters thrown into more interesting situations along the way. In other words, it's about the journey, not the destination. Yet in Rise of Skywalker, not one of these MacGuffins ever actually leads to an interesting character interaction or worthwhile payoff in the story. It quite literally is just an arbitrary goal to fill the screen time. None of the characters learn anything or grow from the experience.
For instance, the hunt for the ancient Sith dagger caused Rey to get swept up in a confrontation with Kylo that ultimately led her to accidentally destroying a transport ship with Chewie allegedly onboard. This could have been an interesting plot point that causes Rey to doubt herself and reflect on her Jedi training. Maybe Luke was right and it was a mistake to train her; maybe she doesn't have as much control over the force as she thought; maybe she is a danger to her friends and it would be best to part ways or abandon her Jedi teachings. I don't know, just some kind of self-reflection or contemplation on her actions could have added some dramatic weight to the film. But instead, we find out just minutes later that Chewie is still alive, and none of it really matters anyway. Rey is unshaken and the show goes on.
The writers are so lacking in originality that even the next MacGuffin recycles the same trick. Now that they have the dagger, the ancient Sith language inscribed on it needs to be deciphered by a protocol droid, but C3PO is unwilling to do it as part of his programming, so they have to find a hacker on planet Kijimi who will force C3PO to translate it. The real bombshell comes in when we learn that in order to reprogram C3PO to read it, his memory will have to be wiped, effectively "killing" C3PO as we know him. Putting aside how convoluted and pointless this whole plot setup is, this all leads up to what should have been an emotional self-sacrifice scene where C3PO says good bye to all his friends, except since 3PO was barely in the previous two films and has had virtually no meaningful interactions up until this point, the scene largely falls flat, and the cherry on top of it all is of course that he doesn't even lose his memory anyway, because R2D2 ends up restoring it; once again pulling another fake out with a character's death.
So what do we get out of the secret information extracted from the Sith dagger? Another god damn MacGuffin! Why do we even need so many MacGuffins? So far we are now at least a third of the way through the film, and absolutely nothing of substance or consequence has happened as a result of chasing all these MacGuffins. What has Rey learned? How has Finn grown? What has Poe done? So much time wasted, and still all the film has to offer is more MacGuffins.
Now we're off to the moon of Endor, where apparently by standing in some totally random spot and holding up the dagger in just the right way, it reveals the location of the "wayfinder", our latest plot gimmick and final MacGuffin. At this point, there are multiple layers of absurdity at play here, even putting aside how unlikely it is to stumble into exactly the right spot for the Sith dagger to reveal its secrets. Like, why would the Sith build a device that is just supposed to point to another device that points to the actual location of significance? Are they afraid the wayfinder would somehow get misplaced so they need a proverbial "Find my iPhone" feature to locate it? But even if that were the case, why make our "Find my Wayfinder" tool something as primitive as a dagger where the relevant information stored on it is static so it can't be updated? What if the wayfinder moves locations? Then the Sith dagger is suddenly worth jack shit. They could have just slapped the information on an encrypted Sith holocron where it could be stored digitally on a commonly-manufactured device and updated if needed.
After all, it's not like it makes sense to leave the wayfinder in some abandoned and unguarded death star wreckage if it's supposedly so important in maintaining the secrecy of the Sith homeworld, which now that I mention it, raises another question about this whole plot setup. In order to inscribe the coordinates of the wayfinder onto the dagger, that means this dagger had to be manufactured after the death star had already crashed on the moon of Endor, so the Sith already knew that this wayfinder was sitting unguarded in the wreckage when they were making this dagger. Why wouldn't you retrieve it first and place it in a more secure vault that hasn't been destroyed already before you go and start crafting a special dagger specifically for pointing out the coordinates to the wayfinder?
In fact, why isn't the wayfinder itself also just a Sith holocron? It's just star map data, but apparently it's such super special star map data that it needs to be given its own special name. Guys, this is like the real-world equivalent of calling your GPS a "roadmapper" even though functionally it works identically to any other GPS and there's no real reason to give it such a specific name; you're just calling it that to make it feel more special than it actually is. We already have a name for GPS. It's called GPS. And we already have a portable storage medium for digital information. It's called a flash drive. Likewise for the Star Wars universe, we already have star maps and holocrons, so why invent this new device with such a limited purpose and functionality? It's NONSENSE. All of this nonsense.
The real point here is that more than likely Chris Terrio, the hack writer behind this film, doesn't even know what a holocron is because he's not actually very knowledgeable about Star Wars lore, and probably doesn't care either, which is why he should have never been allowed anywhere near this film in the first place.
Like so many other things in this film, Rey's revelation of her Palpatine lineage similarly falls flat and laughably retcons a key plot point from The Last Jedi. Instead of just accepting Rey's "nobody" heritage and moving on like they should have, Chris and JJ bend over backwards for the fans to insist that Rey has some important bloodline.
Here's the thing about big twists like this though: the reason why Vader's reveal was so effective in Empire Strikes Back was because of how it impacted the emotional dynamics of the characters. Luke thought he was pretty much fighting the embodiment of pure evil up until this point. How could he possibly have any relation to such a horrible person? He was forced to reevaluate his entire worldview and had a mental meltdown where he was screaming that this had to be impossible. It was a massive turning point for the trilogy and made the relationship between Vader and Luke so much more interesting going forward because it became about Luke trying to redeem his father instead of just trying to strike him down because he's an evil bad person.
For Episode IX on the other hand, how does this revelation impact Rey's character? Does she suddenly have a change of heart about Palpatine? Does she think he can now be redeemed? Does she have any kind of introspection about her place in the universe? No. Her conclusion is still the same as it was before this discovery. Ole Palpy is still an evil bad person and evil bad people must be defeated.
The constant need for this trilogy to make it a big plot point out of what everyone's lineage is has become such a recursive cliche that it's bordering on parody of itself now. It's not enough to reveal that Ben is the son of Han Solo, but we also have to subvert the cliche by making it a big deal that Rey is related to nobody, but oh just kidding! We're gonna subvert the subversion because she's actually related to the emperor after all! It's just so redundant at this point that it's absurd. So-and-so important person always has to be related to some other important person instead of just being important and interesting on their own merits.
And in the end what does the story gain from this narrative jump-roping? Nothing. Rey's goals are still the same, now with just an added plot hole that her parents were actually really nice caring people even though Ben already stated previously that they were junk traders that sold her for drinking money.
Don't get me started on the final confrontation with Palpatine. Not only does he initially order Kylo to kill Rey even though he doesn't actually want her killed, but when he does have Rey brought to him, he orders Rey to strike him down. This supposedly would allow his soul to possess Rey's body as part of some Sith ritual. Seems straightforward enough, except Rey initially refuses, and then over the course of a bunch of explosions and fighting thereafter, the film seems to forget this whole plot point and Rey ends up killing Palpatine anyway. But it doesn't result in her being possessed! She just wins! And mind you, all the stuff that happens in between this is just as nonsensical! Like when Palpatine suddenly acquires force lightning so powerful that he can wipe out large swaths of the resistance fleet with it. He also makes some blurb about possessing all the power of the sith within him, and likewise Rey retorts that she has all the power of the Jedi within her, even though at no point in the plot was it ever established that these two were somehow storing thousands of force users' strength within them. It was an ocean of deus ex machinas; completely deflating any sense of tension whatsoever since the characters' power levels and motivations could change on a whim at any given moment.
I point all this out because they aren't just nitpicks. Consistency matters. Again, it's not just about the arbitrary fact that force ghosts can't interact with the physical world, or Palpatine can't shoot lightning that wipes out entire fleets. It needs to feel consistent so that the viewer can feel properly grounded in a believable universe, where consequences feel real because you know and understand that when something goes wrong, the rules aren't suddenly going to change out of convenience to undo it. Now the Star Wars universe is so incomprehensible and the rules are so completely broken that it's just hard to even take seriously or get invested in anymore. As long as any sequel makes references back to the events of this trilogy, I will be forced to somehow try and reconcile it with my own version of Star Wars canon, which makes this infinitely infuriating because it's impossible to do. None of it makes any sense, and even if it did; even if someone could explain away every plot hole in this film, we would still be left with a wholly underwhelming plot written at the caliber of a video game side quest where there is no meaningful or interesting character interactions whatsoever. Just fetch the thingy so you can go find the other thingy so you can kill the big bad final boss. That's literally the fucking story here.
I haven't even gotten into how Rey's healing ability is ill-defined and introduced out of left field, or that Lando's cameo is just wasted fanservice because he barely has any screentime and doesn't add any emotional weight to the film, or that the Knights of Ren still aren't really given a backstory and just kind of show up at random times to have cool fight scenes, or that new characters like Zorii Bliss and Jannah are also introduced with almost no screentime or relevance in the plot and could have been easily written out without any impact to the story. I could talk about how Kylo Ren just shows up out of nowhere in the death star wreckage to fight Rey even though we never saw or heard his ship approach. In fact, it feels like there are numerous missing establishing shots needed to properly set up scenes. No scene in this film ever lingers long enough to build an atmosphere or to allow the audience to fully appreciate the moment.
Also fucking space horses. Seriously, this film is a mess. There is so much wrong with it that I have to summarize half of these issues in one sentence apiece just so I can move on.
The worst thing the prequels did was ruin the mythos of Vader by making me only see Anakin's angsty teenage face behind the mask, but for all their issues with wooden acting, lackluster cartoon-level dialogue, boring plotting, excessive green screen sets, and so on, there is at least a certain coherence and consistency to them. After watching them all I can feel like I saw a complete vision that expanded the lore and fleshed out the universe, so even if I didn't like them, they didn't fundamentally break the lore in a way that I can't make sense of in my head. The Star Wars galaxy still felt like a believable place. But Episode IX had so much broken logic and insulting writing that suspension of disbelief was just totally gone for me.
I honestly don't know how this franchise can recover from the damage caused by this film short of retconning the entire sequel trilogy. Further sequels would either have to be careful not to acknowledge any events from this period of history, or just avoided altogether in favor of focusing on more prequel content like the Old Republic era; none of which I think are propositions that Disney is willing to commit to indefinitely. So Star Wars is just fucked. And it's all thanks to this movie. That's why it's easily the worst Star Wars film, and I'd rather watch the prequels. Any prequel. Whatever it takes to wipe the smell of this cinematic wet fart from my memory.
I honestly believe the Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn should have gotten film adaptations instead of these...abominations. Ditto for the Hand of Thrawn duology, also by Zahn. Such a shame that Disney 86ed the Star Wars EU.
ReplyDelete